


In This Life

by th_esaurus



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 21:44:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She seemed always to be waiting for something. (Post-Savoureux)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In This Life

They guessed she was a student. 

She was the sort of young and pretty girl who should've been in Paris with a gaggle of adoring boys, making love through laughter and drinking wine in the shade of the Arc de Triomphe; but instead she sat alone in café corners with a dark scarf wrapped around her head and throat, ordering espresso in hastily-learnt French. The boys had to be content to watch her from a distance. She affected the false confidence a girl alone in a strange city must, and so they figured her a student, speculated on what she might be reading, mourned for how much nicer she'd be to look at without all that silk wrapped around her.

She seemed always to be waiting for something. Sipped her small cup slowly, tucked in loose strands of her black hair, and watched the windows and doorways. 

*

In early spring, she brought letters with her and read them over and over. Each one had her address written in ink and tight cursive on the front, and some of the bolder boys tried to lean over and see where she lived, but she kept the envelopes face down upon the table. She handled the paper with too much care for a girl reading weeping notes from American parents about how much they missed their darling girl. 

She handled each one like a page of the bible.

*

As the weather warmed, her scarf migrated south, tied handsomely around her neck. She wore her hair in a plait on the side, over one ear, knotted with care and held in place with bobby pins and ribbon. Her vocabulary was expanding – she ordered madelines with her coffee – and she even began to return the whistles some of the boys gave her with a curt nod, a girlish smile, though she never flicked her hair like some of the looser Americans they had sport with. 

One of them, the boldest of them all, sat with her, made conversation with her, laughed when she didn't know her words and told her he knew a little English. He bought her drink for the day. She held her letters very tightly in her hands, whenever his fingers danced across the table towards her. 

He didn’t join his peers in the café the day after, nor the day after that.

But he had always been bold and flighty and prone to fits of fancy, running away with girls to St Raphael for weekends of languid lovemaking, so they thought nothing of it.

*

She would sit sometimes with catalogues from the Louvre and Musee D'Orsay, tearing brioche apart with her fingers and eating it in small bites. She had pamphlets from Perrotin and Challier, ticket stubs from La Gioconda and Don Quixote. Nobody ever saw her write out a petty postcard with the same photo of Notre Dame that adorned every tourist guide; nobody ever saw her with an Eiffel Tower tote bag. 

The boys argued whether she was studying art or music, ancient or modern. One of them, somewhat pertinently, wondered aloud who was paying for all this, but he was drowned out by the clamour to romanticise her. 

She paid them no mind. They were not real people, to her. It seemed as though she were still waiting for someone real.

*

Summer came, and she wore wide-brimmed straw hats and dresses with flowers on them. She kissed cheeks with the waiters she knew by name, and chatted to them in her quaint accent before she took her seat.

The boys loved the scar on her neck. It was such exotic fuel for their storytelling and they wondered feverishly – abusive ex-lover? A tantalizing birthmark? A hunting accident? 

All Americans hunted, didn't they? 

She had just one letter with her now, and she read it daily, smiled and smelled the paper as though it carried the scent of her home. She watched the windows still. Watched and waited and tried never to look too disheartened when evening fell and the shutters began to close.

*

It was mid-August when the gentleman arrived. She trembled as she watched him walk up to the café, and if she had tried to stand to greet him, the boys suspected, her thin legs would not have held her. They had never seen her so agitated. She wore a mint tea-dress and had a satchel over her shoulder, and, brushing by, one lad reported it was filled to the brim with letters. Just letters.

She cried when the gentleman took up his seat beside her. A shuddering tear she couldn't hold back, and he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped it away before it stained her cheek pink. 

He called her Abigail. They all sighed at hearing her name at last. It was such a homely name, reminded them of her imagined roots, her farmland childhood and Hollywood-tinged upbringing. 

The gentleman, it became apparent, was not her father. They embraced like people drowning, and he kissed both her cheeks and then her mouth, and she clutched his face and tried to taste every part of him. He hushed her. He hushed her and soothed her like they were alone in the world, like nobody was watching; or if they were, their gazes were so insignificant that he could swat them away like flies.

He sat and spoke with her in low tones; the boys leant in and listened, and tried to understand. This is all they caught:

"Is he coming? Is he coming too? Your letters didn't say and I didn't—I didn't have any way of—"

"Will is—currently indisposed, my dear. He will join us soon. I'm sure of it."

The gentleman touched her pale cheek with his wide hand, and she unplaited her hair for him. He smoothed back the ebony curtain of her hair, and for a moment the boys thought they saw something strange and ugly and cauterized where her left ear should have been; but they must have imagined it. 

She was smiling so widely they must have imagined it.

The American girl and the gentleman from Europe left the café mid-afternoon, arm in arm, and every young eye in the place followed them as they walked. 

*

Nobody sat at her usual table for a good week after. But she never came back to claim it.


End file.
